


Skirting the Truth of Things

by Bodldops



Category: The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Cecily Markham, Clements Markham, M/M, Minna Markham
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:01:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bodldops/pseuds/Bodldops
Summary: Merrick has always known he was a bit odd amongst his fellows, but on this one particular point, it would never be an accepted oddity.At least, not with most.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 47
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Skirting the Truth of Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flashforeward](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashforeward/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, flashforeward! I hope you like where I took your prompt, thank you for it!

Hong Kong, 1857.

The heat was almost a living thing, the humidity turning the air into a soup that barely stirred down at street level. Merrick hurried his interpreter along, his hand firm on the boy’s shoulder. He just wanted to be out of all this, back on-board ship, back to India. The meeting at the Hong Kong office had been just as useless as he suspected it would be, but it wasn’t as if he could go and complain to anyone about it. Not here, anyway. He suspected Singh would have something to say about it, when he caught word – if there was anyone who had less fondness for pointless territorialism, it would be him.

It wasn’t until the cadence of the words around Merrick changed that he realized he must have cut over towards the docks a few streets too early – instead of the more familiar cajoling to buy wares or the shouts of workmen calling to each other, there was a different sort of chorus of voices altogether. Coy or brazen, some purposefully languid, all a lot more than friendly, shockingly familiar. Of course Hong Kong has a red light district, and here he was marching young boy along it. Fantastic. 

“I feel I should remind you that I expect you to never repeat anything you hear.” Merrick noted, attempting firmness and… oh, he didn’t know, something like moral guidance. 

Keita snorted in his too-mature fashion, sounding more like the man he will be than the boy he was.

“I have heard it before, you know.” Maybe not quite like the man he will be, Merrick noted, even as he frowned in consternation at the less-than-mature reply. 

“Now where the hell did you…?” Keita, not pausing in his forced march, tipped his head back give Merrick a sardonic look. Merrick sighed. “I don’t want to know, do I? Anything I need to sort out?”

“No.” Keita informed him flatly, clearly unimpressed by his belated protectiveness. “You do not want to stay? The ship will not be ready to sail for at least an hour.” 

“No,” Merrick repeated with equal flatness, doing his level best to pretend he hadn’t heard that. In truth, the proprietors here had no particular interest for him. He never had been drawn to these sorts of places, not while he was in the Navy, and not now. While in the Navy he’d even made up a somewhat over-complicated story about a sweetheart back home, just to stop the questions. Was it really so hard to understand that he just wasn’t interested?

“No, and even if you were, it is not a good idea.” Keita piped up, in that too-wordly, too-old way of his. 

“Thank you, I guess, but stop talking to things I haven’t said! How do you do that?” Merrick demanded, without much hope that he’d get any answers beyond the usual.

“You have one of those faces.” Keita offered, as usual, and their talk fell back along older paths as the harbor finally came into view.

London, 1859

“Merrick? Could you come through a moment?” Clem called from his study. His desk was practically awash in papers. Most were in semi-tidy piles of varying heights, some with clues as their contents – that one had a scrap of parchment peeking between the papers, probably having something to do with one of the Egyptian expeditions, and that one over there was mostly newsprint - Clem was never very good about actually keeping up with the abundance of news this town could generate, but he tried all the same. 

“Merrick old man, I’m trying to get the last of the paperwork sorted for Peru, and of course the lawyers do like to assume the worst will happen, don’t they? They want to know who you want they should do with your possessions should some Indian shoot you for stealing their precious cinchona trees. I figured you didn’t want that lout of a brother pawing through your bits and bobs, so what lucky lady should I put down? You’ve never said, but there was someone, wasn’t there? Some preacher’s daughter, wasn’t it?” Merrick blinked at this wall of information, and then rubbed the back of his neck, awkwardly. 

“Hah, I can’t believe you still remember that. I mean, you never even met her.” Merrick stalled, awkwardly, not sure how exactly to get himself out of this one. Honestly, he hadn’t thought of that at all since coming back. No one was exactly interested in the romantic prospects of a permanent cripple, after all. 

“What? Of course I do, Samantha something-or-other, wasn’t it? Come now, don’t be shy. After all, nothing will come of it.” Clem noted offhandedly, with a little half-laugh. “It’s all over-anxiousness.”

“Clem, I…” This would be the time to own up to it, of course. A ridiculous lie of a younger man who hadn’t yet learned to ignore the comments of his fellows. 

“She wouldn’t have me. Not with… this.” He finished, lamely making a half-aborted gesture towards his leg. He told himself it’s to avoid a fight so close to the expedition, that it is better this way. He doesn’t believe a word of his own lie. He just didn't want to face the endless questions he was sure would follow, the helpful 'fixes' he was sure would be offered. He didn't see how it was any of Clem's business, and he didn't need fixing.

No that part of him, anyway, thank you.

There was a long beat of silence. 

“… Is there… someone… else?” Clem asked, sounding like he wasn’t sure how he felt about the question, or the potential answers, but unable to resist inexorable curiosity.

“No.” He said it with a laugh, not sure how to make it sound like something he’d recently come to terms with. “Put down Charles, he can just chuck anything he doesn’t like into Father’s study with the rest of it and ignore it forever.”

He must have sounded convincing – Clem laughed, one of his big booming laughs, and they moved on from that point without further sticking. He could only hope it wouldn’t come up again.

Cornwall, 1881

“Uncle Em, you are being impossible.” Cecily huffed, unknowingly an eerie echo of her father. Minna and Cecily had arrived at Heligan two hours before, and now they were taking over. He’d thought he’d done a decently good job organizing the house for Christmas, but according to Minna and her formidable daughter, he was deeply mistaken. 

“You can’t have a proper holiday party with only four people.” Cecily explained, as if to someone who was particularly dense. “Not in a house like this, it is a travesty! The empty hall is practically gloomy. Now,” Her brisk tone echoed back to Clem’s, and he did his absolute damnedest not to flinch. Even now, the memory of that cold night in Peru burned. “We will straighten all this out, don’t you worry, but there must be someone who has caught your eye. I just…”

She sighed, and in a rare moment of uncertainty, bit her lip.

“We just want you to be happy.”

“I am!” Merrick protested. “I promise, I’m fine, I am!” Neither Minna nor Cecily looked particularly convinced. If anything, they seemed deeply unconvinced. After that, they’d simply planned his life for the next few days clean over his head, and before he knew it he was going to be hosting a massive holiday week end party… with lots of eligible ladies, he was told. 

When he was asked about where the best source of local holly was, he made a break for the garden, Quixote bouncing at his heels. As he trudged out to the greenhouse, he found himself slowly running his fingers over the beads of Raphael’s rosary. It was days like this that he missed Raphael the most. He worried, sometimes, that the relationship he remembered wasn’t quite like what actually was. He imagined it was easier for other people, people who didn’t take a shocking length of time to realize that not all poetry was being impossibly florid, that people really did feel like that about other people, about other people’s bodies. 

Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was then all too easy to mix up that strange unfamiliar beast that was lust and that elusive creature that was love, which would explain quite a lot of the world’s heartbreak. At least he didn’t have that problem, he had quite enough as it was. 

He paused to check on the markayuq in the garden, making sure it still had the key for the greenhouse and giving it a vial of salt - more as a show of respect than any need here so far from home - and then stepped into the humid warmth of the greenhouse himself. Settling himself by the furnace once it was stoked up, he dug the latest letter from Raphael’s monastery out from his jacket pocket. 

Soon. They said it would be soon, three or four months at the outside. This was a secret he’d have to keep from the girls – he could hardly explain that the only person who’d ‘caught his eye’, so to speak, wouldn’t be awake again until the new year. Soon though, for however long he would be graced, he would have someone to sail that river of time with, side by side. Someone who'd never looked at him the way that those 'eligible ladies' were certain to look at him tonight, but still had managed to becomes someone more than a friend. Someone he could imagine those florid poems being written about, at least in part.

It was a brilliant Christmas gift; the best one he’d ever received. For that, he would put up with a whole house of holly.


End file.
